A pro se litigant pressing questions of statewide procedural law on a record built almost entirely from a twelve‑minute body camera recording, two affidavits, and the briefs the parties themselves filed below.
William Montgomery is a pro se petitioner before the Colorado Supreme Court. He is not an attorney. He drafts, files, and argues his own pleadings; he relies on the procedural rules and controlling decisions of the Court for whatever protection the system affords self‑represented parties; and at the time of the underlying incident he was a Colorado consumer doing what every Colorado consumer is entitled to do — shop and walk out unhindered, free from any seizure unsupported by probable cause.
On the afternoon of November 25, 2022, Mr. Montgomery visited a Best Buy store in Westminster, Colorado. He entered the store, walked directly to the returns department, realized he had brought merchandise intended for a different store, and immediately exited without making any purchase. While standing outside, he was approached and surrounded by three Best Buy employees who accused him of theft.
The detention lasted approximately twelve minutes and was recorded in its entirety on Mr. Montgomery's own body camera. During the detention, employees repeatedly demanded that Mr. Montgomery show them what he held in his hands and empty his pockets, made multiple statements that police had been called (no police were ever called that day, a fact not even disputed by Defendant during the MSJ briefing), and never once identified what specific merchandise Mr. Montgomery supposedly possessed.
The receipt that Defendant later produced — for the first time in its MSJ reply — bears Mr. Montgomery's name and account, but the underlying purchase was made by his brother, David, an authorized user of Mr. Montgomery's credit card, at 2:20 p.m. The body camera shows Mr. Montgomery standing outside the store at 2:19 p.m., one minute before that purchase was rung up. The Court of Appeals did not address this contradiction.
The Court of Appeals' Opinion contains a footnote cataloging prior cases Mr. Montgomery has filed against retailers and police following similar interactions, and references YouTube content describing his approach. A sophisticated amicus reviewer will encounter this material before deciding to sign. The points below are a quick orientation. A full deep‑dive page — "The Record" — documents this in granular detail, including a side‑by‑side comparison of the Walmart and Best Buy facts, a compact timeline of the prior litigation, and primary‑source PDFs. The same page also gathers, with deep links into the live consolidated briefing PDFs, every passage in which Plaintiff has himself directly refuted the “lawsuit scammer” framing on the record — "From the Record Itself".
No. The procedural questions presented here are independent of the underlying facts. Whether a movant must come forward with evidence in its opening brief, whether a non‑movant forfeits objections by failing to file a motion to strike (in pure diametric conflict with Amada), whether bare argument can "raise an issue" under C.R.C.P. 56—these are questions of law that affect every Colorado civil litigant, regardless of who is asking. Amada, Wallman, Morlan, Central Bank, and Suncor apply with the same force whether the petitioner is a repeat plaintiff or a first‑time litigant. Plaintiff has, in any event, separately addressed the merits of the prior‑litigation framing in his own briefing — most extensively in MFR § II, and on appeal in Appeal Opening Brief § III.
No — they are diametrically opposed. Every fact element in the prior Walmart cases is absent at Best Buy. Best Buy has no "back" registers; it phased out plastic bags in July 2022; it has issued digital‑only receipts to account holders since November 2017; and at the Westminster store on November 25, 2022, Mr. Montgomery was not even a customer. Beyond that, in this case the District Court granted summary judgment on evidence (a manager's affidavit and a receipt) that Defendant did not produce until its reply brief — which is the procedural posture that makes this case the right vehicle for the cert questions. The full comparison is on The Record →
The Court of Appeals characterized Mr. Montgomery as describing how he obtains "free lawsuits." The actual usage is the inverse: that overzealous retailers hand out lawsuits by detaining customers without legal basis. The video does not mention Best Buy, depicts no conduct from November 25, 2022, and is in fact a response to an attorney's commentary about the prior Walmart litigation — published almost a year after the Westminster Best Buy incident at issue here. As a matter of basic evidence law, generalized statements about a years‑long practice cannot prove specific‑occasion conduct; nor can a video discussing a different chain prove what occurred at Best Buy. A litigant's documentation of a public‑facing legal practice is not evidence that he committed the acts a defendant later accuses him of, and it has no bearing on whether C.R.C.P. 56's burden structure was honored below. Plaintiff laid out the four numbered grounds for the YouTube‑video objection in his Court of Appeals Opening Brief, pp. 47–49.
Across four consolidated proceedings, three appeals, and two cert petitions, no court has ever entered a finding that any of the Walmart claims was frivolous, vexatious, groundless, or in bad faith. No sanctions, warnings, or filing restrictions have ever issued. Each case raised distinct legal arguments preserved from the prior case, and Colorado law explicitly protects this kind of advocacy. See Hamon Contractors, Inc. v. Carter & Burgess, Inc., 229 P.3d 282 (Colo. App. 2009); Eurpac Serv., Inc. v. Republic Acceptance Corp., 37 P.3d 447 (Colo. App. 2000). The current Best Buy court is the first tribunal to deploy the "lawsuit scammer" frame — a frame Plaintiff directly contested in writing, both at the trial level (MFR § II; Atty Fees Response § II) and on appeal (Opening Brief § III).
Yes, and that is the often‑overlooked mirror of the affidavit–receipt contradiction. The footnote characterizes Plaintiff as a serial fake‑stealer: someone whose alleged practice is the refusal to show a receipt, in order to provoke a detention and then sue for false imprisonment. Read carefully, the framing accepts as its own internal premise that Plaintiff does not actually steal. Mere refusal, on Defendant's own theory, is sufficient to trigger a detention. An actual theft, by contrast, would create real criminal exposure — a conviction, not a civil claim — with no offsetting upside. A rational actor pursuing the alleged “modus operandi” therefore does not steal.
Defendant's reply‑only manager affidavit alleges the opposite — that on November 25, 2022, Plaintiff did actually steal. The footnote and the affidavit cannot both be true. Either the “scammer” characterization is wrong, in which case the prior‑litigation footnote collapses on its own terms; or the affidavit's theft allegation is wrong, in which case Defendant's reply‑only evidence falls apart and summary judgment is unsupported. The framing is a self‑defeating premise: it cannot simultaneously brand Plaintiff a fake‑stealer and rest its summary judgment on his having actually stolen.
The receipt — Defendant's own evidence of a 2:20 p.m. purchase on Plaintiff's account — sharpens the point further. A fake‑stealer would not also buy. An actual stealer who, per the affidavit, “immediately left” the store would have had no time to make any purchase at all. The only sequence that even attempts coherence — purchase, then steal, then leave — is irrational on the framing's own premise (why bother stealing after a purchase has already rung up?), and is in any event contradicted by the body camera, which shows Plaintiff already detained outside at 2:19 p.m., one minute before the receipt timestamps any purchase. As between an attorney‑drafted, witness‑sworn affidavit and an independent computer record bearing date, time, account information, item code, and purchase amount, the receipt is the more verifiable artifact — and once accepted, it is the affidavit that must give way.
Three pieces of evidence — receipt, affidavit, and characterization — that the Court of Appeals adopted as concurrently true. None of them survives in the presence of the others. The framing Defendant has spent eighteen months deploying against Plaintiff is, in the end, the framing that rules out the very theft Defendant's own affidavit alleges. See also From the Record Itself — Plaintiff's contemporaneous, on‑the‑record refutation of the “modus operandi” characterization across five briefs.
Because the rules the Court of Appeals announced will be deployed against every pro se Colorado plaintiff and every resource‑limited civil litigant going forward—not just Mr. Montgomery. A movant may file an evidence‑free opening brief, observe the response, produce its actual evidence only in reply, label it "rebuttal," then argue forfeiture to any later objection. If left uncorrected, the decision below makes summary judgment a judicially sanctioned ambush. That is a problem larger than this case, and it is exactly the kind of problem amicus briefs are designed to flag for a court of last resort.
The questions presented in this petition are not about Mr. Montgomery. They are about C.R.C.P. 56 and what every civil litigant in Colorado is entitled to expect when they walk into court.
The attorney fee award unable to be paid by a SNAP‑recipient pro se litigant residing in an RV due to disabling medical conditions.
Meticulous briefing from the November 2022 incident to the May 2026 cert petition—every step pro se, with sworn affidavits and body camera footage at the core.
Pro se Colorado plaintiffs will face the procedural labyrinth the Court of Appeals announced — rules it created without authority that conflict with multiple controlling decisions.
What follows is editorial commentary by the Petitioner. It is not part of the cert petition. Amicus support of the petition does not require, and should not be read to imply, agreement with any of it. It is offered for the reader who reaches the Court of Appeals' “lawsuit scammer” footnote and pauses — because the pause is reasonable, and so is its resolution.
Across more than a decade of consumer‑rights litigation in Colorado state and federal courts — over twenty filings, four consolidated proceedings against Walmart in 2020–2021, three appeals, two petitions for certiorari, ongoing parallel matters at the trial level (some of which the Petitioner is currently winning), and now this Best Buy matter — no tribunal has ever entered a finding that any of the underlying claims was frivolous, vexatious, groundless, or in bad faith. No court has ever issued a sanction. No court has ever warned, reprimanded, or restricted the Petitioner's filings. Across that entire arc, the most adverse procedural posture the Petitioner has ever occupied is the one in this case: a published Court of Appeals Opinion that declines to address the merits and instead deploys, in a footnote, a characterization the Petitioner has refuted directly in writing.
What “engagement” would mean here is concrete. It would mean a court issuing a written decision that picks up the Petitioner's six‑page direct refutation in MFR § II, or the dedicated section of the Response to the Motion for Attorney Fees, or the dedicated Court of Appeals Opening Brief section on the same subject — and disposing of those passages on the merits. Sentence by sentence, argument by argument, citation by citation. None of that has ever happened. The framing has been deployed across multiple Opinions; it has never been defended in any Opinion. The reader can verify this directly by opening the linked PDFs. The asymmetry is not an interpretation of the record. It is the record.
A merits loss tells the litigant what was wrong with the litigant's arguments. It produces a written analysis the litigant can respond to, appeal, or refile around. A characterization loss tells the litigant nothing actionable — the court has ruled against not the argument but the person. The Petitioner's record contains many merits losses across the prior Walmart cases, all of them appealed, several of them cited approvingly by the Petitioner himself in subsequent briefing because they articulated rules he could then preserve and re‑litigate. Those are merits losses. They are how appellate practice is supposed to work.
This case is structurally different. The Court of Appeals' Opinion in this case, the District Court orders below it, and the prior‑litigation footnote that frames both, do not respond to the Petitioner's preserved arguments. They respond to a characterization of the Petitioner — a “lawsuit scammer,” a “targeter,” a “baiter” — that no court has ever defended in writing and that the Petitioner has, in fact, contested in writing five briefs deep, eighteen months running. The reader who finds this troubling is reading the record correctly. That is what the procedural posture below looks like.
A characterization that goes unanswered in one case does not stay in that case. Each subsequent court inherits the prior court's framing — sometimes as a footnote citation, sometimes as a passing reference, sometimes as the entire premise of the Order — and treats it as established. Within a few years, a litigant who was characterized once is characterized everywhere: by courts that have never read his briefs, never reviewed his evidence, and never engaged with the substantive arguments he has been preserving on the record from case to case. The original characterization is never re‑examined; it is simply forwarded.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Two parallel cases against Best Buy are now in motion (BB II and BB III), and both reflect the same cookie‑cutter pattern: the prior‑Walmart characterization is invoked, the Best Buy facts are not independently examined, and the case proceeds on the inherited framing. The risk this creates for any litigant — particularly a pro se litigant pressing arguments that do not fit a familiar template — is real, structural, and getting worse rather than better. A characterization that compounds without ever being defended in writing is, by definition, a characterization that cannot be answered. That is the doctrinal problem, and it is the problem this Petitioner has been quietly absorbing for a decade.
Receipt‑checkpoint disputes have moved from comment sections into legal scholarship and trade press over the last fifteen years. The Florida A&M University Law Review's “Big‑Box Bullies Bust Benign Buyer Behavior: Wal‑Mart, Get Your Hands Off My Receipt!” documents exactly the pattern this Petitioner has been litigating for a decade — the legal scholarship coined the phrase, in print, well before any of the Petitioner's filings. Hofstra Law Review and other journals have published companion analyses on the constitutional tensions in merchant‑detention statutes. This is not a fringe concern.
The Salzmann article also catalogues the line of authority that defeats a shopkeeper's‑privilege defense in cases like this one: Crase v. Highland Village Value Plus Pharmacy, 374 N.E.2d 58 (Ind. App. 1978) (privilege requires probable cause that both a theft occurred and that this specific person committed it — generalized presence is not enough); West v. Wal‑Mart Stores, Inc., 539 So.2d 1258 (La. App. 1989) (brief, apologetic detention to make a shoplifting inquiry is unreasonable false imprisonment when no corroborating evidence of theft); Williams v. F.W. Woolworth Co., 242 So.2d 16 (La. 1970) (the moment a customer refuses to consent, “legal justification for the detention ended”); Zohn v. Menard, Inc., 598 N.W.2d 323 (Iowa App. 1999) (voluntariness of consent is a fact question when employees said “new store policy” required handing over the receipt); and Mullins v. Friend, 449 S.E.2d 227 (N.C. App. 1994) (rejecting profile‑based stops as a basis for the privilege). Colorado's own version of the privilege — C.R.S. § 18‑4‑407 — sits at the more demanding end of this spectrum, requiring probable cause that goods have been unlawfully taken, which a generalized receipt request cannot supply.
Mainstream Colorado outlets including Colorado Politics, the Denver Gazette, and the Colorado Springs Gazette have covered the prior Walmart case in detail; a compiled news‑articles exhibit was filed with Plaintiff's MSJ Response in the underlying case. National outlets, including The Sun, have published interviews with consumer‑protection attorneys (one with three decades in practice) on the legality of receipt checks. The behavior at issue — store employees detaining departing customers without articulable cause and then citing the shopkeeper's privilege to short‑circuit civil liability — is documented, recurring, and growing.
The fact pattern is also not novel. The Salzmann article opens with the case of Michael Righi, who refused to show his receipt at a Cleveland Circuit City in 2007, was physically blocked at his car door by the manager, and was arrested by police who agreed with the store that it had the right to inspect his receipt. Righi was eventually exonerated of any theft. The article quotes Righi at the time: “I've always taken the stance that retail stores shouldn't treat their loyal customers as criminals and that customers shouldn't so willingly give up their rights along with their money.” What happened to Righi in 2007 is, structurally, what happened to the Petitioner in 2022 — including the same fact that “when local law enforcement upholds illegal detentions, it does not cure the underlying illegality.”
The Petitioner has been working at this in some form since the early 2010s. He has filed at his own expense, drafted every brief himself, prosecuted three appeals himself, and is now before the Colorado Supreme Court without counsel for the third time. Whatever else is true about the prior‑litigation footnote in the Court of Appeals' Opinion, it should be uncontroversial that a pro se litigant willing to take a recurring civil‑rights pattern through the appellate process at his own cost — while disabled, on SNAP, and residing in an RV — is doing what civil‑rights litigants have always done. Exactly what the docket exists to make possible.
Salzmann's article closes with a sentence that, sixteen years after publication, reads as a direct answer to the “lawsuit scammer” footnote: “Litigation may not prevent unlawful detentions related to receipt‑checking, but enough consumers complaining just might.” The academic literature, fifteen years before this case was filed, identified what the Petitioner has been doing as the only known mechanism for changing the policy. He is not a lawsuit scammer. He is, in the article's own words, the corrective.
The cert petition presents four critical questions about C.R.C.P. 56: (i) whether a non‑movant forfeits objections to reply‑only evidence by failing to file a motion to strike or request for surreply, in pure diametric conflict with Amada Family Ltd. Partnership v. Pomeroy; (ii) whether a Court may conflate independent motions by treating one party's Cross‑MSJ reply as a surrogate surreply to the opposing party's MSJ reply; (iii) whether a Court may recharacterize a non‑movant's burden‑of‑proof challenges as factual “denials” sufficient to admit reply‑only evidence as “rebuttal”; and (iv) whether bare argument can “raise an issue” under the evidentiary‑production rule. These are questions about how summary‑judgment briefing works in Colorado, full stop. They would matter if the Petitioner had no prior litigation history at all, and they would matter if the Petitioner were a Fortune 500 corporation. They are not about him.
But the wider pattern explains why those procedural questions have been litigated for three years without substantive engagement. When a litigant is characterized rather than answered, the procedural rules become the only place where the neutral application of law can be tested. If the procedural rules announced below are left uncorrected, the characterization wins by default — not on the merits, but by procedural shortcut. A pro se litigant who is summarily characterized and then procedurally foreclosed is, in practical effect, denied access to the courts. That is exactly what cert review exists to correct. A procedural‑fairness petition is not the same as a personal‑vindication petition; an amicus signing for the procedural rule is not signing for the Petitioner. But the procedural rule is what stands in the way of every Colorado civil litigant who is, for whatever reason, not engaged on the merits. That is a problem larger than this case, and it is exactly the kind of problem amicus briefs are designed to flag for a court of last resort.
An amicus need not, and should not, sign on the strength of any of the above. The petition stands on its procedural grounds alone, which is how it was drafted and how it should be evaluated. The questions presented affect every Colorado civil litigant; they would deserve cert review even if the underlying facts were entirely different. This note is for the reader who needed to know the broader stakes existed — and who can now return to the procedural argument, which is the actual basis for amicus support.
Press coverage of the petition and the underlying case will be linked here as it becomes available. Reporters and editors interested in the procedural‑fairness story or the underlying civil rights story are encouraged to reach out directly.
As reporters who have covered Mr. Montgomery in prior matters continue to follow this case, links to coverage will appear in this section. Press inquiries: william@bestbuyamicus.com.